Actually, the way I read the sonnets doesn't directly relate to "our ever-living poet." It's just that when I read "That time of year thou mayst in me behold . . ." and "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow . . ." and "Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee/Calls back the lovely April of her prime . . . " and "My glass shall not persuade me I am old/So long as youth and thou are of one date . . .", I get an overwhelming sense of the author's age and of the author's age relative to his subject. There's also a strong sense throughout the sonnets of how personal they are.

This feeling combined with the facts (Meres's comments about them being circulated only privately and the dedications of the epic poems to Southampton and his release from prison soon after the queen's death) do a great deal (along with sonnet 107) to clarify for me the author's actual age when the queen died and also cause me to expect that the sonnets would only be published posthumously.

So when I find out that there was, for one reason or another, no author's dedication for the sonnets AND the publisher's dedication could be read as a eulogy AND the eulogy, if it is one, is apparently taken from one of the plays AND Shakespeare was not only alive but was not particularly close to the age I would have expected, something just goes CLICK in my mind.

Of course I could be fooling myself. Maybe I just like wild theories where the experts are all (supposedly) wrong. I am biased in this way, in fact. Maybe I'm reading the sonnets with a foregone conclusion in my head already. I can't prove that I'm not any more than I can convince someone to read the sonnets the way I do. Maybe the author saw a portrait of Southampton's mother "in the lovely April of her prime" and did not actually know her then.

Maybe. But once you tell me it was de Vere's daughter whom Southampton was supposed to marry and de Vere was married to Burghley/Polonius's (assuming the caricature theory is correct) daughter and de Vere's brother-in-law just happened to write about R and G and de Vere's son-in-law was one of the First Folio dedicatees . . . well then I'm just done. At that point I'm an Oxfordian and it's probably a lifelong malady.

BUT I can still appreciate Stratfordian arguments and, to be fair to someone who has never heard about all this, I really should be able to represent Stratfordians competently. After all, R and G were common names and, as I believe Matus points out, "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow . . . " is NOT the same thing as saying "I am forty."

I just recently was talking to a local artist who absolutely scoffed at the idea of de Vere as the author. He reasonably countered every argument I gave even though he didn't know much. I was happy to hand him Stratfordian arguments and have him say, "yes, exactly, that's the right way to look at it."

So I am extremely interested in what Stratfordians have to say even if I am personally a bit of a long shot as far as changing my mind goes because of that intuitive CLICK.

As I approach fifty, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs which shake against the cold/Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang . . ." is just a tough nut to crack.

But maybe Shakespeare of Stratford just wasn't aging as gracefully as I am and ran into his autumn in his thirties. Or maybe the poem wasn't as personal as I think it is.

I agree with the connection you suggest, and I think it is valid to approach the sonnets intuitively, that they are deeply autobiographical. However, there are so many divirgent interpretations of the sonnets, and so many theories spun off of them, that I think one does need to be careful not to fall into the frame of mind that one is dealing with historical evidence. I would only add that have not seen a Stratfordian interpretation that is remotely compelling.

Matt could you clarify your statement?

Now that Hamlet is more or less put to rest inasmuch as I think I can argue the Stratfordian case (plays deal with universal events like marriage, conflict, loss of parent etc and so can be made to fit many people) maybe we should have one last Stratfordian perspective on the sonnets.

If you are willing to assume for the sake of discussion that Southampton is the subject of the sonnets then I was hoping to find out how Stratfordians account for the apparent one generation age difference between author and subject?

• "When forty winters shall beseige thy brow . .. " I assume the argument is well, that doesn't mean the writer is forty.
  
  
• "Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime . . . " I assume the argument is he might have seen a portrait of the boy's mother.
  
  
• "My glass shall not persuade me I am old so long as youth and thou are of one date . . . " Not sure what to say about this one. I think Shakespeare was 9 years older than Southampton but maybe he felt much older. Or maybe it was just a poetical exercise.
  
  
• "That time of year thou mayst in me behold, when yellow leaves or none or few do hang . . . " I assume the argument is that this doesn't give a numerical age and the author could have been in his thirties.

All previous help with my little quest has been much appreciated and I will get to reading Matus again (unless there is a better book for this sort of thing).

Sure. According to Diana Price the eulogy in Henry VI Part 1 reads in part:

" . . . our scarce-cold conqueror/That ever-living man of memory/Henry the Fifth"

I read "our ever-living poet" as a (very brief) eulogy and nod to Henry VI Part 1.

Of course, I've been wrong before. . .

So the sonnets are factual documents? Is that what you are saying?

Ho hum. Might as well read a laundry list or a recipe for Beef Wellington.

Could it be that they are poetry, flights of imagination, wordsmithing of beauty and complexity; that not everything in them is meant to be taken literally? That they are not in fact prosaic diary entries?

Otherwise I am forced to conclude that Walt Whitman was a sailor. That W.S. Gilbert was in fact a pirate king. And that Mick Jagger was born in a crossfire hurricane.

Well yes, I guess I do take the first 17 sonnets literally. I make the following unprovable assumptions:

1. The first 17 sonnets are written to Southampton.

2. The repeated urging to get married and produce an heir, "for love of me" is real in that the author really wants Southampton to get married and produce an heir.

I take it that the Stratfordian position on the first 17 sonnets is that we don't know if there was any specific person whom the author wanted to get married. He may, for example, have been ruminating on marriage and children in general. The idea that there was one specific person whose marriage the author had a personal stake in is not supported by the evidence and is really just a fantasy.

How am I doing? (I figure if I can get the Stratfordian take on the first 17 sonnets down, I can extrapolate to the other sonnets.)

1. The phrase "ever-living" was not used exclusively by Shakespeare; other uses by other writers abound.

2. The phrase "ever-living" was also used to refer to living people and to God.

3. Henry VI, Part 1 was probably a collaborative play and it wasn't published until 1623, so it probably wouldn't have been recognized by anyone in 1609 as a reference to a play performed 17 years earlier. (But of course I understand that plays into the Oxfordian conspiracy scenario.)

The 'fair youth' sonnets were written to Southampton. The first 17 urged him to marry - as was expected of all young aristocrats to continue their line.

It didn't need Oxford to do this. If you want an alternative author, Burghley would be a better candidate since he was the one most directly involved in marrying off Elizabeth de Vere.


Morella.

They certainly could have been.



Or whoever commissioned the series, which is more likely.



So I take it the Oxfordian position is that we do know?



You're doing exactly what Oxfordians usually do: reduce the very diverse scholastic debate down to simple notions that you can bat away with what you think is a subtle clever riposte appealing to common sense. Unfortunately it also illustrates why Oxfordian arguments aren't taken seriously by academics.

Great, so it sounds like Stratfordians are willing to consider the possibility at least that Southampton was the subject of the sonnets and that the first 17 sonnets were aimed at getting him to marry.

Oxfordians say the author indicates repeatedly that he is much older than Southampton (Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime . . . When forty winters shall beseige thy brow . . .) and in later sonnets (My glass shall not persuade me I am old so long as youth and thou are of one date . . . , That time of year thou mayst in me behold . . . ). Obviously if de Vere is the author, these lines make sense given his age. They do sound rather odd coming from a man 9 years older than Southampton.

Personally, I like the "the sonnets may have been commissioned" idea. It allows them to be aimed at Southampton, to be personal, to be private, and to take on a voice other than Shakespeare's own. And it's a lot more likely than a gigantic conspiracy.

I am much closer now to being able to represent both sides now without the listener knowing which I favor. I appreciate all the responses.

Listen to the pot calling the kettle black!

In the case of Oxfordian debate, the points certainly can and have been batted down as they are; they don't need to be simplified and distorted. That you don't accept that they have been convincingly refuted does not speak to the fact that 99.99 percent of academics do.

...the record is stuck. Tell me, in that case, why Simonton thinks your are wrong.

Regarding the dot in the W, there's a book called, "Problems in Shakespeare's Penmanship" written by a Stratfordian that explains that the "ornamental dot" in W's and other letters were common features of Elizabethan writing.



I haven't read the whole book yet. It will be interesting to see how the author explains the disconnect between the 2nd and 3rd signatures and the 5th and 6th signatures which don't look at all like they were written by the same person.

But then, as the author of this book is quick to point out, many non-experts offer their opinions and these opinions (he says) are not worth much. The book was written a long time ago so he spends his words trashing "Baconians" but I have enjoyed what I've read so far because he does mention their arguments and he explains where they (the Baconians) have gone wrong.

"But of course . . . Oxfordian conspirary scenario." Hmmm . . . I detect a little sarcasm here. Is "Pistol" another "Grumman"?

Well, I've seen AND read the play, and I can say without reservation that it's a prime example of Shaksper's "imagination." It's a play he just wrote for the money; it has nothing to do with himself. After all, it's just lots of fancy quotations and stuff like that. And I also heard that "Finnegans Wake" is just a bunch of crazy words hashed together to make money too.

Honestly, Pistol, if you can come away from a reading of the sonnets not even slightly curious as to who wrote them AND WHY, then you've got more problems than Herr Grumman. I mean, folks, Pistol's tone reminds me of why I no longer give a freak about the Authorship Question---if someone wants to think that a non- or semiliterate chap wrote "Hamlet," then they're free to; I don't care anymore. Etc., etc., etc.

If "someone" wants to believe it?

Virtually everyone believes it. And I would argue that is why it is actually important.

More than even understanding the works. And certainly far more so than giving or taking correct attribution. And it is not that these are not important.

It is as the supposed "skeptical community" might say about "supplanting mythological narratives of the past."

Why is this not more obvious? How am I the only one that seems to feel this way.

Even anti-Stratfordians don't seem to get this. This is what has always motivated me.

Illustrating how easily and completely a mythology has become the accepted truth and orthodoxy.

>"how easily and completely a mythology has become the accepted truth and orthodoxy."

I for one agree that this is the horrific principle in the abstract realm beyond who wrote Coriolanus. Worse than the myth that not talking about our emotions will cause us to "explode." (A kind of Rumplestiltskin myth that saying words will break the spell, that we are walking pressure-cookers needing to let off steam in the form of blab about our "feelings" lest we spontaneously combust like the character in Dickens' Bleak House who ends up as "foetid effluvia"). The Shakespeare myth requires reversal of many basic and essential literary and creative truths: that literature of any value emerges from meaningful (often traumatic) life experience; that literature that lasts through time originates in writing what one knows, not what one absorbs second- or third-hand in a tavern; that one writing for cash tends not to insert allusions to Niobe and Italian artworks available for viewing only to guests of the Gonzagas in Mantua.

Professor D, I agree and at this abstract level clearly why it is import for everyone in the literary world to be willing to examine and rethink all of these bad assumptions. And clearly why there are opportunities for advances in critical thinking within the literary profession.

But in actuality I was thinking about it from an even more abstract level. One where the authorship myth reveals things about all mythology. And the reason I find that it should be important to generic skeptics.

But it seems that we completely fail to draw these people in and try and have a conversation on the evidence, logic, relevance, and depth that might better enable others to truly grasp the ramifications and importance of this to the larger world.

But just the thought that a mythology is taught in universities the world over should offend virtually any rational person.

1. I wonder why Oxfordians do not work harder on handwriting as well. I've always felt it was critically important to identify Oxford's secretary hand. And I've tried to do some of this. And believe that the Shakespeare Halle MS in the BL is a great place to start. And it has lead to my own personal conjecture that Oxford writing exists in strange places like the play Julian and July in a Folger Library MS.

2. I've seen many crazy interpretations of this where some suggest that this is a reference to god. But most seem to understand that it is a way of speaking about immortality. Problem is Mr. Shax clearly was not regarded as immortal while I would argue Shakespeare clearly was. Odd it would seem to me.

3. I find the recent revelation (to me) that there is also the connection to Ramelius (Henrik Ramel). Clearly just another example of Shakespeare's much more superb knowledge of the English Court happenings. And discussed among much more apparently in Sten Vedi's new book Elsinore Revisited. Which should also be seen as interesting as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.

4. See above

5. As all should be aware I have pointed out my Sonnet Explication/own conjecture relating exactly how the Sonnets relate to Southampton and relate how the initials are the clue to the proper order of the Sonnets.

6. Not only was there a pseudonym used, I'm offering that it was used from a very early time (in the early 1570s). Which should be suggestive that is was only later that an actual front was required. And that the front was clearly a deliberate hoax. (see 5).

7. I think Katherine Chiljan in "Shakespeare Suppressed" makes a rather impressive argument about the impossibility of the level of output in the time fram e allotted is an even more superior argument.